Conventionally, a vehicle such as a minivan is provided with a sliding door which is moved in a forward and backward (longitudinal) direction of the vehicle. By the sliding door, an opening provided to a side portion of the vehicle is opened and closed to facilitate loading and unloading of passengers, baggage, and merchandise and so forth. Specifically, a guide rail including: a linear portion extending in the forward and backward directions of the vehicle; and a pull-in portion curved from a vehicle's front side of the linear portion toward the inside of a passenger compartment, is provided to the side portion of the vehicle, and a roller apparatus which supports the sliding door along the guide rail is moved to open and close the opening.
In order to open and close the sliding door, a powered sliding door apparatus which automatically opens and closes the sliding door is mounted on the vehicle. Usually, a powered sliding door apparatus of a so-called cable-driven type is often adopted, and moves the roller apparatus by pulling a cable provided along the guide rail. As a roller apparatus, techniques described in for example Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publications Nos. 2012-193515 and 2015-202863 have been known.
In the roller apparatus (roller unit) described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2012-193515, a cable end of each of an open-purpose cable and a close-purpose cable is in a columnar shape, and each columnar-shaped cable end is hooked on a hook portion of a holder base fixed to the sliding door via a base bracket. Here, the hook portion is formed into a substantially “U” shape, and the cable end is attached from an opening portion of the hook portion. This hook portion can have a problem of, for example, having a heavy weight in order to ensure stiffness, because the shape of the hook portion is complex, molding of the holder base is difficult, and a relatively large load for moving the sliding door is applied to the hook portion.
Thus, as a more simple structure, a roller apparatus which can be enhanced in stiffness as compared with the technique described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2012-193515 is described in, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2015-202863. The roller apparatus (sliding structure) described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2015-202863 has a roller hinge which supports a sliding door, and a pin (guide roller pin) is fixed to this roller hinge. On a tip side of the pin, a guide roller which moves in a center rail is rotatably provided. On a base end side of the pin, an annular cable end (also simply referred to as “cable end”) is attached. At a base end of the pin, a key flange having a rectangular section and protruding in a moving direction of the roller apparatus is formed. Inside the cable end in a radial direction, a key (recessed portion) having a rectangular section so as to correspond to the key flange is formed. These key flange and key cross each other in a cross shape, with the cable end attached to the pin. With this configuration, the cable end is retained in the pin.